Preservationists give flicker of hope to endangered films

Thursday

Jan 10, 2013 at 12:01 AMJan 10, 2013 at 1:51 PM

With its next series, the Wexner Center for the Arts will celebrate the rescue of the odd and the unusual. "Avant-Garde Masters: A Decade of Preservation" will begin tonight with a series of short films introduced by Jeff Lambert, assistant director of the National Film Preservation Foundation in San Francisco.

Terry Mikesell, The Columbus Dispatch

With its next series, the Wexner Center for the Arts will celebrate the rescue of the odd and the unusual.

“Avant-Garde Masters: A Decade of Preservation” will begin tonight with a series of short films introduced by Jeff Lambert, assistant director of the National Film Preservation Foundation in San Francisco.

According to the Film Foundation, which is dedicated to movie preservation and restoration, half of all American movies made before 1950, and more than 90 percent of films made before 1929, are lost.

Want to see The Way of All Flesh, the 1927 movie for which Emil Jannings won the first best-actor Academy Award? You can’t; the film is considered to be lost. The UCLA Film and Television Archive has a five-minute snippet of footage.

One of the culprits is the nitrate film stock that, before 1950, was the industry standard. Nitrate film easily decomposed and, even worse, was flammable. Acetate film, which replaced nitrate, tended to fade. Not until more-stable polyester film was created in the 1990s did the problem lessen.

Plus, before the secondary home-viewing market took off, out-of-circulation movies were often treated like old magazines and discarded.

“The nitrate film was expensive to ship and dangerous,” Lambert said in a phone interview. “At the end of its run, there were often instructions to just dispose of the prints. Luckily, there were projectionists and other people who held on to them.”

Hollywood has gotten behind the preservation effort. In 1990, director Martin Scorsese created the Film Foundation, which has salvaged more than 560 movies.

In 1992, Congress became involved by asking the Library of Congress to study film conservation. The resulting report led to the creation of the National Film Preservation Foundation.

“The mandate of the Film Preservation Foundation is to deal with the non-Hollywood films: home movies, industrial films, documentaries, educational films, travelogues,” Lambert said, “things that wouldn’t survive without public support, because there’s no market incentive.

“But they’re of immense historical interest — home movies by an African-American porter on a train from the 1950s. It’s very unique to get his point of view.”

Lambert was inspired to work in preservation as a student at San Francisco State University. There, he took a film-history class taught by Scott Simmon, a film scholar who had helped restore the single surviving copy of a 1920 Spanish movie.

“It was through his film-history class that my eyes were opened to the way that film preservation could help fill gaps in film history,” Lambert said in a subsequent email.

And he takes a glass-half-full approach to the statistics on the number of films lost.

“While .?.?. (the figures mentioned) seem discouraging, I’ve learned to take an optimist’s approach,” he wrote. “Instead of bemoaning what we think is lost, better to think of all the discoveries there are to uncover.”

On Wednesday, a tribute to the filmmaking Kuchar brothers will take place.Experimental filmmaking is near and dear to Lambert, who produced the DVD set Treasures IV: American Avant-Garde, 1947-1986 and is curating the foundation’s next set, Treasures 6: Next Wave Avant-Garde, due for release in 2013.

“There’s a certain freedom that the filmmakers take, the artists take,” he said. “It forces audiences to look at film in a different way than what they’re used to.

“When you come out of an avante-garde, you look at the world differently.”

Cinematic stinkers

The worst in moviemaking will be featured during “Bad Movie Nite” Friday at Studio 35 Cinema & Drafthouse.

For January only, the tribute to the terrible will take place on the second Friday of the month.

Glee star Chris Colfer takes a turn at screenwriting and producing in Struck by Lightning (2012).

High-school senior Carson (Colfer) has big plans to be a writer if he can only get out of his tiny hometown. Before he can, he is struck by lightning and killed — and the final few weeks of his life as an outcast are told in flashback.

The film is screening at the Gateway Film Center.

The supporting cast includes Allison Janney (Juno) as Carson’s drug-addled mother, Rebel Wilson (Bridesmaids) as his friend and Dermot Mulroney (My Best Friend’s Wedding) as his estranged father. Also at the Gateway:

$ellebrity (2012): Director Kevin Mazur looks at life in the white-hot spotlight for major celebrities and how stories about the stars feed the media machinery — and fans’ obsessions.

Crawlspace (2012): Soldiers must remove a team of scientists from a military compound after it comes under attack by strange forces, but the mission is threatened when the soldiers find a woman with amnesia. The Australian film is next in the “Nightmares on High Street” series.

Barbara (2012): In 1980, an East German doctor (Nina Hoss) applies to emigrate to the west and join her lover. Instead, she is sent to work in a small-town hospital. But, as her boyfriend plans her escape, she starts to fall for her new boss. The film is in German with English subtitles.

Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has To Travel (2011): The life of the fashion maven and former fashion editor of Harper’s Bazaar and editor-in-chief of Vogue is examined.

Puella Magi Madoka Magica (2012): The Gateway will show a double feature of the movies based on a Japanese TV series about a girl with magical powers who fights witches that cause murders and suicides. Part 1: Beginnings and Part 2: Eternal will be screened.